Nvidia’s Jensen Huang has predicted that the UK will become an “AI superpower” after major US tech firms pledged tens of billions of pounds worth of investment in the country.
He told a press conference: “We’re here to announce that the UK is going to be an AI superpower”
Huang, the co-founder and chief executive of Nvidia, a US Artificial Intelligence chip-maker, also announced a new £500m investment in a British firm.
Along with Donald Trump Huang, who attended Wednesday night’s state banquet with King Charles, said he was taking an equity stake in NScale, a UK cloud computing company, and predicted it would earn revenues of up to £50bn over the next six years.
The Guardian reports: Huang cited as evidence of Britain’s potential its universities and several companies founded in the UK, ranging from the AI giant DeepMind to the driverless car startup Wayve. “You just don’t appreciate it. Your universities. Come on. You’re too humble,” he said.
The semiconductor boss spoke as China moved to ban its biggest AI firms from buying Nvidia chips, in a sign of the growing geopolitical battle to gain dominance in AI.
Huang said he was “disappointed” at reports that Beijing was bringing in the ban, adding: “It is safer for the world that China and the United States collaborate in AI, and Chinese researchers collaborate in AI than to isolate.”
He said Nvidia was selling 120,000 graphics processing units to the UK as part of an investment amounting to £11bn, with 70% of that cost coming from computing and networking, including the chips, and 30% going on land, power and the structures of the datacentre.
Huang said the combined additional computing power would be “approximately 100 times the performance of the fastest supercomputer in the UK right now, the Isambard AI supercomputer [in Bristol]”.